Ads

The Honey and honey bee?

The Honey and honey bee?

The honey bee, one of nature's most productive pollinators, is the only insect in the world that produces food suitable for human consumption. The irresistible sweet taste of honey has been sought by people for hundreds of thousands of years and dates back to prehistoric times. Back then, the only way to get honey from a colony of bees was to destroy the beehive. The modern practices of the 125,000 beekeepers in the United States enable an environmentally friendly method of obtaining honey without harming the colony itself.
Honey and honey bee

Honey and honey bee


Every year, over 160 million pounds of honey is collected from the bees in our country. Common uses of honey range from cooking and as a natural sweetener to medicinal uses, and in ancient times the Egyptians even used honey as an embalming material to preserve the dead. There are an estimated three million active beehives in our country that are intended for commercial production.

The production of honey starts with a flower. Many insects, especially bees, are attracted to flowers because of their nectar content. While collecting this soft, clear liquid, the bees inadvertently cover themselves with pollen, and during their subsequent journeys, the pollen spreads to others in the beehive and other flowers on their journeys. later. This process enables fertilization of various fruit trees and plants, many of which would not have reached harvest without the intervention of the bee.

Once the nectar has been extracted and stored in an inner pouch that acts as a second stomach, it is returned to the hive and placed in a waxy honeycomb by a subsequent worker bee. Nectar, which is mostly water when collected, mixes with various enzymes as it evaporates, creating the thick, syrupy end product that we all associate with honey. Ventilation is essential to achieve this, and the hum that comes from a beehive is the colony flapping its wings in almost unison to create such an effect. To produce a pound of honey, it is estimated that the colony would have to travel two million times to see more than fifteen hundred flowers. In terms of mileage, this colony of bees would have traveled fifty-five thousand miles to make that pound of honey.

There are over 300 types of honey commercially available in our country, and each of them is seasoned by the bees themselves for the place where they collected the nectar. Orange blossom honey, for example, has a slight citrus flavor and is made from orange and grapefruit plantations. Clover honey is extracted exclusively from different types of clover plants and is one of the most popular types of honey available in stores today.

No comments

Powered by Blogger.